News and Events

Professor Ashutosh Varshney and Professor Patrick Heller will lead a forum on India's 2014 Elections on Saturday, May 24. Join us for 2014 Commencement Forums and explore the breadth of knowledge and experience in the Brown community, and help celebrate Brown's many triumphs in education, research, and service.

Read Professor Ashutosh Varshney's Financial Times column on Narendra Modi's landslide victory. Prof Varshney discusses key factors in the Modi campaign that secured his triumph, and ponders the future of Mr Modi's relationship with the RSS and its implications for India's economic ressurection.

Join novelist Rana Dasgupta and a host of other discussants for an open-ended conversation regarding the social, economic and ideological platforms held by contending parties in the ongoing Indian national elections, and their implications for India's future.

Join us Friday for this semester's final Brown-India Seminar talk, in which Rina Agarwala, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, discusses informal workers launch alternative labor movements that use the power of their votes to attain social welfare, creating new forms of state protection and extending their movements transnationally by partnering with international agencies, unions in other countries, and universities.

This Wednesday at MIT, Prof. Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Brown-India Initiative, will discuss the meaning of potential outcomes of the 2014 Indian General Election with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi. The conversation will be moderated by Abhijit Banerje, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT.

Jonathan Shainin, news editor at The New Yorker, will be moderating a discussion between political scientist Ashutosh Varshney and author Rana Dasgupta. Varshney and Dasgupta’s recent books both examine what defines “contemporary India,” though they come from very different perspectives: one a collection of essays on the deepening of democracy since 1947, and the other a literary portrait of the daily relations and inequality that define Delhi.

Taran Raghuram's India Initiative Fellowship project featured on Explore Watson. Read all about Raghuram's work with civic-action organization Janaagraha, and research that brings a global outlook to local issues.

Dr. Ashwini Deshpande will share her research on income gaps between marginalized and non-marginalized populations in India, and on the effects of self-employment on the earnings structures of these households.